Literature Circles
WHAT WE THINK IS IMPORTANT ABOUT LITERATURE CIRCLES Harvey Daniels didn't invent them...there have/had been book groups before. Making sure kids are talking about what they are supposed to be talking about...holding kids accountable for the discussion...putting notes on chartpaper and sharing it with class. Kids have specific roles. For me, the discussion director role goes against each kid having ownership of their role. I removed that role so each role is a director. His discussion director role is too self-centered...I want it more democratic. The groups look nice since teacher had good management skills. Kids did their roles but the conversation was not real...So, where are the roles too static? How does it happen for your group of kids? Tape record 5 minutes of talk at each table. Give kids a rubric to analyze their 5 minutes of tape...train them to listen for 5 kinds of communication and did it happen? How do you teach a procedure for good book talk without the procedure itself becoming rigid and empty? (Just like how do you teach writing without the form becoming a formula? Choice of books for groups may be key. For some of us, books with strong narratives help. Kids need experience just talking about books and using reader response as a whole class prior to lit. circles. Lit. circles will not work early in year. Kids need models of how to have such discussions...a fishbowl. Teachers may say it didn't work first time and won't try it again. Are kids learning literacy or the joy of reading literature in such groups? Students need a mix of experiences. One experience provides kids with literary analysis...another activity may provide them with other skills. Teacher frames/tailors the activity. Certain books or activities lend themselves more to one activity/goal than another. Two goals: We want to increase student skills levels and bring them into into richer world of literature...both need to happen. (Yet, term literacy class, to me, is reductive.) Literacy has been reduced to meaning reading and writing. This is a literacy class -- here to increase our online abilities. We also want people to be comfortable using nonfiction, working online, etc. Humanities classes: Have 5 books around a topic stocked or is it improtant to have students choose books of their own? Purpose of lit. circle is important...want a rnage of things over the year...whole class work (showing the range of reader response possible), independent reading of choice, books in lit. circles addressing your essential question. We want lit. circles to push a social construction of knowledge. Humanities class used lit. circles for immigrautin unit, each group reading about a different immigrant book. Mixed bag...depending on book and reading level. Also, purpose was to gain information. In a Rampoup group, after months of independent reading, students worked well in groups reading African-American literature for Black History Month. Perks of Being a Wallflower by Hilary Frank worked well. Students can talk about personal lives, which is good scaffold for talking about books. As a one-shot deal, my class is using lit. circles to discuss an article. Don't need to have roles...High interest article or novel will get good discussion. Kids will do what we hope they will do in a discussion. Hard to keep energy going for lit. groups. Short stories are a good way of trying it out. Need to build up to lit. circles...issue of preparation is key. I've seen in some adult groups, students helping each other understand parts of books they didn't understand. I don't know how it comes about...I didn't teach it. How do we help students build stamina to have extended conversations about books? They can do about it some topics, but not others. That might be what lit. circles is for. HAS ANYONE USED NICENET FOR HAVING KIDS RESPOND TO LITERATURE? I have had teachers do it. Depending on the book chosen, some conversations were richer...they went beyond life fo the course. Others just fulfilled course requirements. I used both nicenet and blogging for discussing Macbeth. Nicenet worked better for getting talk going back and forth about a class book. We also used a whole-grade blog for 9th graders in which they talk about their independent reading. Kids get recommendations ("If you like that, you should try this."). Having kids learn about having a good book talk takes years...it is an art. But having kids write back and forth to each other about their reading is actually even harder...Yet, talking about "Push," for example, can lead to book talk and help kids make new friends through this talk. On a blog, kids may see they get lots of responses on their post about a book. My seniors are trying "Brave New World," 10th graders doing independent reading...should there be different blogs? Structural issues are coming up for me. What does this look like? Technical stuff is important, but if teacher has not fostered talk about books before that, it doesn't matter. These things must go hand in hand. In colleges, professors set up blogs around themselves. But another way to do it to set it up for each particular class and using blog just during class. How do you decide: Nicenet vs. blogs for fostering class discussion? To me, the way it looks visually may be important. How the posting and response look...which do you want to be primary, the post or the response? I have seen teacher posts guide it all: Do you want students to respond to each other or only to you? You can notice different kinds of language and levels of opinion in a blog, nicenet, wiki's. In blogging, you find more "I" statements. Discussion boards are quicker and more available. Blogs are much more multi-media. With online discourse, we need to model how to write a response online about literature. That takes time (just as it does to model other kinds of writing). You can require different ways to write online responses. Should we think of asking students different roles for responding online to literature just as Daniels created roles? Having students create an open-ended question of their own at the end of their posted response is nice. Return to New York City Writing Project